瞿宛文的部落格Tooze: The Sociologist Who Could Save Us From Coronavirus
Ulrich Beck was a prophet of uncertainty—and the most important intellectual for the pandemic and its aftermath.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-could-save-us-from-coronavirus/
Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope, anonymous and invisible, were the common denominator of our new epoch: “A fate of endangerment has arisen in modernity, a sort of counter-modernity, which transcends all our concepts of space, time, and social differentiation. What yesterday was still far away will be found today and in the future ‘at the front door.’” The question, so vividly exposed by the crises such as Chernobyl and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is how to navigate this world. The relevance of Beck’s answers are even more apparent in our day than they were in his own.
…The West’s first wave of modernization had been carried forward by an enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of nature by science and technology. The disorienting realization of the late 20th century was that those very same energies, those same tools were now the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment. To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not deny the benefits of modern medicine. But nor could we deny its risks and side effects, intended and unintended. What was required was, for want of a better description, a “scientific approach to science.” In this age, which Beck dubbed second or reflexive modernity, the challenge was to find ways to employ the tools of modernity—of science, technology and democratic debate—without succumbing to the ever-present temptations of glancing backward to a more familiar age or engaging in denial.
This is not easy to do. There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the contemporary risks created by modern technological development….
In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous, in advance of encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it, “incompetent in matters” of our “own affliction.”…
The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than starting from immediate experience and abstracting from there to general claims about the world, the news of the day starts by reference to mathematical formula, chemical tests, and medical judgements. The more we rely on science, the more we find ourselves distanced from immediate reality….
What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan micropolitics. This was a logical extension of his model of reflexive modernity, in which not just science has been dethroned, but also the previously demarcated sphere of national politics, dominated by parliaments, sovereign governments, and territorial states. …
If Beck’s readership in the United States was thin, the same was not true in East Asia, where since the 1980s the German sociologist cultivated a devoted following. Beck was attractive notably for progressive Korean social scientists dedicated to the critique of their national model of authoritarian modernity. For Beck, the eagerness with which his concept of second modernity was adapted by Asian social scientists was living proof of the dynamic open-endedness of the reality he was trying to describe. In such collaborations a process was set in motion that provincialized European concepts and history without consigning them to irrelevance. Japan, South Korea, and China were undergoing an industrial revolution more rapid than anything experienced in the West. They were huge laboratories of the Anthropocene and the churning appropriation of nature.
In July 2014, Beck visited Seoul and laid out the implications of his model of risk society for thinking about crises such as the Japanese nuclear accident at Fukushima in 2011, the Sewol Ferry Tragedy in Korea in 2014, and China’s plague of air pollution. Beck was particularly keen to suggest ways in which East Asia might creatively overcome the bitter legacy of 20th-century history, if not at the level of national politics, then through the subpolitics of cooperation between the megacities of the region that were fast emerging as global hubs. The progressive administration of the city of Seoul launched a city lab to incorporate Beck’s ideas into their urban planning….
Beck would no doubt have appreciated the syncretic gesture. Five years later, he would have been even more pleased to see the entire world taking lessons from a progressive South Korean government on how to handle the COVID-19 crisis. In the face of bitter opposition from medical interest groups, the South Korean government effectively mobilized coalitions of businesses and scientists to deliver fast and effective testing and tracing. Rather than relying on clichés about Confucian conformity to collective norms, they set out to build trust through transparency and effective delivery. Not only did the Democratic Party government contain the epidemic, but it even managed to hold a national election in the midst of the crisis and win it handsomely. The country offers an example, in what remains of this pandemic, of how to get risk society right.